The responsibility and accountability for security is rapidly shifting toward DevOps engineers, as they have greater visibility into the broader architecture of processes and systems used to deploy applications. Effective DevSecOps makes application deployments, operations, and service monitoring easier and more secure. In particular, DevOps engineers will be responsible for securing the Infrastructure as Code in which they build. In this Refcard, we explore IaC security, how it works, why it's important, and core practices for success.
Infrastructure is one of the core tenets of a software development process — it is directly responsible for the stable operation of a software application. This infrastructure can range from servers, load balancers, firewalls, and databases all the way to complex container clusters.
Infrastructure considerations are valid beyond production environments, as they spread across the entire development process. They include tools and platforms such as CI/CD platforms, staging environments, and testing tools. These infrastructure considerations increase as the level of complexity of the software product increases. Very quickly, the traditional approach for manually managing infrastructure becomes an unscalable solution to meet the demands of DevOps modern rapid software development cycles. And that’s how Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has become the de facto solution in development today.
This is an article from DZone's 2022 DevOps Trend Report.
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Enterprises are embracing cloud-native technologies to migrate their monolithic services to a microservices architecture. Containers, microservices, container orchestration, automated deployments, and real-time monitoring enable you to take advantage of cloud-native capabilities. However, the infrastructure required to run cloud-native applications differs from traditional ones.
With the increased reliance on various technologies for software development, both software and hardware need to grow along with those technologies to provide reliable and secure services. However, this need has led to creating more complex solutions than ever. Thus, the importance of robust infrastructure has come to the forefront to deliver these solutions reliably at a global scale. Due to these facts, the platform team has to face different challenges to provide and maintain this infrastructure without affecting the software development lifecycle (SDLC) or end-users.
What Is a Platform Team?
We have Dev for development, QA for testing, and likewise, the platform team for managing the infrastructure of an organization. This infrastructure includes both internal SDLC resources like CI/CD pipelines, staging/testing environments, production resources, and in most cases, managing software deployments. The platform team will handle most operational aspects of an SDLC. They are the key component that manages most of DevOps tools and platforms, bringing the full benefits of DevOps.
The central principle of cloud engineering is adopting software engineering practices. Refactoring is a technique for making changes to code that improve maintainability, enhance performance, scalability, and security without changing its external behavior. In DevOps, refactoring often occurs with modern applications; however, we can apply those same techniques to cloud infrastructure with infrastructure as code.
Refactoring results in many advantages. First and foremost, the code is more readable and easier to understand for other team members –this aids in maintainability and well-organized code, providing a solid foundation for future releases. Overall, if done well, refactoring reduces complexity which makes future changes more efficient.
In Chapter 1 of this blog, we built an AWS landing zone for our React.js/Node.js application. In this episode, we will build the application and deploy it manually. In the next chapter, we will use GitOps based automated deployment of both the Infrastructure and application code.
The app that we will be building is a very simple web application, that creates and fetches contact details to/from DynamoDB.
Although SRE toolsets vary from one team to another, there is one type of tool, Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), that virtually every SRE needs to manage reliability at scale. If you’re not leveraging IaC, you’re not being all you can be as an SRE.
Keep reading for a breakdown of how IaC works, why it’s so important to SRE, and how SREs can add IaC to their reliability engineering strategy.
Infrastructure as code (IaC) is critical for developing cloud-native applications at scale, but with added complexity comes added security considerations. If gone undetected, one IaC misconfiguration can snowball into hundreds of alerts and cloud risk.
In this talk, we analyzed the most common AWS misconfigurations within Bridgecrew’s IaC scan data to illustrate the importance of IaC security. We’ll walk through each of the misconfigurations, the potential risk they pose, and show how to fix them.
In a typical infrastructure build, developers and IT operation teams work coherently to plan, code, develop, and deploy application infrastructure by creating multiple instances and environments to code, test, and run their applications in. However, many complications can arise during the manual development and operations processes within such a build pipeline. Human fallibility is inevitable in any scenario where repetitive manual processes are the norm and everyone is guilty of making mistakes at work; dev and ops engineers are no different. The consequences of such mistakes are that the build process takes more time, energy, and resources to identify and fix errors in the pipeline so the whole process is affected, delayed, and more costly than planned.
As part of this typical infrastructure build pipeline, development and operations teams are also responsible for individually maintaining multiple deployment environments. Managing multiple environments is a further difficulty to shoulder with each of them operating to its own configuration settings.
Infrastructure as code (IaC) means that you use code to define and manage infrastructure rather than using manual processes. More broadly, and perhaps more importantly, IaC is about bringing software engineering principles and approaches to cloud infrastructure. In this Refcard, explore the fundamentals of IaC and how to get started setting up your environment.
Introduction
Cloud-native computing is a new paradigm for enterprise IT that touches all aspects of modern technology, from application development to software architecture to the underlying infrastructure that keeps everything moving.
Cloud-native has thus given us an opportunity to clean house. We can take our newfangled Kubernetes-empowered broom and sweep out all the dusty corners of our existing tech. It would only be logical, therefore, to presume that cloud-native will finally put an end to all that technical debt that has been accruing lo these many years.
With the advent of cloud automation technology, infrastructure as code (IaC) obtains the ability to turn complex systems and environments into a few lines of code that can be deployed even at the click of a button. This new IT infrastructure also automated dev/test pipelines, which provide a rapid feedback loop for developers and rapid deployment of new features for end-users.
The above facts indicate the core best practices of DevOps — like virtualized tests, version control, and continuous monitoring — come to the underlying code, which governs the formation and administration of your business infrastructure. In another way, you can also say infrastructure will be considered the same way that any other code would be.
Introduction
Over the past several years, Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) platforms, such as Terraform, CloudFormation, and Kubernetes, have rapidly gained traction as the preferred mechanism to provision and manage cloud infrastructure. And for good reason.
It wasn’t that long ago that ClickOps was the dominant approach for cloud management. Everyone is sympathetic to the need for agility when there is a business-critical change required. “Just log onto the console” can seem like a perfectly justifiable action. It usually is…until it isn’t.
I would like to start a tradition — I am going to gather all the discussions I had last year with customers and will craft my predictions on how DevOps and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2021. As most of my discussions with customers are always focused around Infrastructure as Code (IaC), this is where I feel I can most accurately speculate.
The world of automation has changed in the past year, remote work, support of remote business, the new digital era, and pandemic constraints will force infrastructure and code automations to level up in 2021. All in all, it is clear that the direction is more automation and less manual work.
This is the first article of the series that presents the path towards automated infrastructure deployment. In the first part, we focus on what Infrastructure as Code actually means, its main concepts and gently fill you in on AWS Cloud Formation. In the next part, we get some hands-on experience building and spinning up Enterprise Level Infrastructure as Code.
With a DevOps culture becoming a standard, we face automation everywhere. It is an essential part of our daily work to automate as much as possible. It simplifies and shortens our daily duties, which de facto leads to cost optimization. Moreover, respected developers, administrators, and enterprises rely on automation because it eliminates the probability of human error (which, by the way, takes second place when it comes to security breach causes).
Having a robust and effective CI/CD pipeline is the key to shorter sprints and effective iterations of cloud-native applications. In order to push updates regularly and successfully, you have to incorporate a number of things into the pipeline, including testing and security.
Terraform is used to build, maintain, and update cloud infrastructure. It runs from your desktop and communicates directly with cloud service providers like AWS.
Infrastructure as Code (IAC) is more than just a paradigm. Developers are now able to deploy the code they have written on a capable cloud infrastructure without having to configure the cloud environment and provision resources manually. With the help of frameworks like Terraform, deploying supporting cloud infrastructure is as easy as writing a few lines of code.
As with other code constructing the app, however, infrastructure code can have faults and may cause errors. The need for improved testing—including testing the resulting infrastructure itself—is growing rapidly. For the longest time, developers relied on manual testing for the ‘solution’—but that comes with its own set of inherent problems: it’s time-consuming, inefficient, and error prone. Terratest mitigates many of the issues in manual testing.
Environment drift becomes an expensive business waste. Bugs and failures happen because teams build against a staging or development environment and then find upon deployment that the production environment is out of sync, which leads to a time-consuming investigation of why and what is missing. Therefore today, on behalf of Apiumhub team, I would like to discuss Infrastructure as code and it’s benefits.
Infrastructure as Code evolved to solve the problem of environment drift in the release pipeline. The idea of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) was spurred on by the success of CI/CD. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) automates the provisioning of infrastructure, enabling your organization to develop, deploy, and scale cloud applications with greater speed, less risk, and reduced cost.
